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DP: I've been slow at getting back to you because I can't find my
copy of The Music so I'll start with a question about
The Commentaries.
When I was reading The Commentaries I kept noticing the shifting
pronouns--all of which seemed to refer back to you.
"I object" starts off "One day you begin to cultivate a personal
cubism". In title and opening line you have two pronouns
referring to yourself. In other poems you employ the inclusive
"we", the third person "he" and even "One". Why all this shifting?
Is it because commentators can position themselves differently
with respect to their subjects?
That's the short answer, anyway. The longer answer would go
something like this: The Commentaries are commentaries to the
poems in the book The Music. The Music was written from 1987-1993,
which were the years when I was married. In1995, when I sat down to revise
The Music for publication, I was separated from my wife and profoundly
estranged from the poems I had to revise. They were written from a reality
I was no longer participating in, and in which I no longer believed.
I had strong objections to many of the poems, and my perspective
had shifted on just about all of them.
There were a couple of books I knew of that had employed commentaries--Spicer's Heads Of The Town Up To The Aether and Cohen's Death of a Lady's Man--and what I remembered from those books is that you couldn't totally play it straight. That there had to be some humour in it, and a multiplicity of perspectives if you were going to generate an interesting text. Otherwise, it would just be interesting for me, but not for a reader. And I guess I was already thinking of it as a supplementary text. Which it eventually became, when it was published four years later. |